The Great Jewish Divide: Pharisees & Sadducees

A History of Mankind (199)

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By the year 100 BC, the Hellenistic East was quickly unravelling. The vacuum left by the collapse of Seleucid power was filled by the Parthians across the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia, but around the Mediterranean there was no big power to pick up the pieces, given the Roman senate’s growing aversion to offer easy triumphs to ambitious generals.

Cilicia became a pirate haven, as did Crete and a few other corners of the eastern Mediterranean. Other territories avoided instability and banditry by offering themselves to the Romans as provinces: after the controversial Roman takeover of Pergamum, the king of Cyrenaica, a childless Ptolemaic prince named Apion who had received the land as an inheritance from his father Ptolemy VIII, handed the kingdom to the Roman Republic on his own death in 96 BC.

Ptolemaic Egypt itself was also willed to Rome on the death of Ptolemy X (r. 107-88 BC), a brother of Cyrene’s Apion. Ptolemy X was fairly energetic and fought back and forth with his siblings and others for control of the Alexandrian throne, going as far as invading Judaea so that another of his brothers wouldn’t use it a springboard to attack him.